She doesn’t know exactly where the waste is, but New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath is sure it’s there and she’ll create a new cabinet minister to root out $600 million of it, she promised Wednesday morning.

“I believe that there is a lot of waste in government right now and I believe that the people of Ontario want to see that waste eliminated, and I don’t think we eliminate it without the hard decisions. Yes, it means hard decisions and a lot of hard work, but it’s incumbent upon us to do that work and make those hard decisions,” Horwath said in a Toronto news conference.

Hard work. Hard decisions. What will they be? Not sure.

Horwath will create a new ministry to answer that question, tasked with cutting 0.5 per cent out of the provincial budget every year. With spending of about $130 billion, that means cuts of $600 million to $650 million. Horwath herself does not actually know where the government wastes all that money, but by making it someone’s job to find it, she’s certain it’ll be found. The new minister of savings and accountability will find it by overseeing other government departments and being responsible for meeting the targets.

“I am confident that there are many types of that overlap in the government, and the problem is that no one is charged with the responsibility to actually find it,” Horwath said. “That to me is the problem. There are a lot of people charged with the responsibility to spend tax dollars but there is no one actually responsible to invest it wisely and so the result is the waste and overlap that we have right now.

Actually, there is someone with that responsibility: the finance minister. That’s the whole job.

Would cutting $600 million from the provincial budget every year — indefinitely — result in job losses? Horwath wouldn’t say that.

“What we are saying is there is a lot of waste in the system. I know that for sure. We’ve watched it. We’ve watched the waste with eHealth, we’ve watched the waste with ORNGE air ambulance,” Horwath said. These are genuine cases of mismanagement of important tasks under the Liberals Horwath hopes to defeat, but they are precisely the sort of thing a government can’t spot in itself. Nobody mismanages things on purpose.

What prevents mismanagement is competent ministers, led by a premier who sets a parsimonious tone. If you don’t have those (as the Liberals haven’t, particularly), governments have people to catch failures and make them public: auditors. Also journalists, who did much of the work to expose the scandals Horwath points to.

Besides naming a second finance minister, Horwath promised to cut eight ministers from the current roster of 26. Which ministries would be rolled into which other ministries? She’ll decide that after the election. She has no ideas to offer now, not even ones that would be obvious if reducing the number of ministries is your goal: merging the education and post-secondary education portfolios, or the research and economic development assignments.

Cutting the number of ministers isn’t a bad idea, but it’s not a very significant one, either: it doesn’t abolish the ministries involved, just moves them under the oversight of fewer people. It cuts some top-echelon jobs in the civil service but Ontario’s universities wouldn’t cease to exist without a minister dedicated to them.

The New Democrats have a long and proud history of sticking up for the little guy in Ontario, but if a philosophy like that is going to be any use, it needs to be backed by an understanding of why the government is the way it is and a clear vision for how it ought to be different. Horwath — the most experienced of the three major-party leaders and the one who triggered the current election campaign — isn’t doing much for her party’s tradition. Bereft of any ideas for reform, she’s running on slogans and nonsense.

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